Qualcomm unveils new Snapdragon 835 SoC details

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Late last year, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835 would be its next-generation smartphone SoC. The new chip is built on a 10nm process in partnership with Samsung, but Qualcomm hadn’t unveiled much in the way of additional details. This week at CES, the company shared new details on the upcoming chip, including clock speeds, core designs, and upgrades over and above the Snapdragon 820.

The Snapdragon 835 will feature the Kryo 280 core and will have eight cores in total in a big.Little configuration. The higher-end cores will run at up to 2.45GHz, while the “little” cores are clocked at 1.8GHz max. It will feature LPDRR4X (a type of LPDDR4 developed by Samsung that uses 0.6V for I/O voltage (Vddq) rather than the standard 1.1V. Qualcomm has shrunk the overall package by 35% while claiming a 20% performance gain, and 25% faster graphics rendering.

It looks as if much of the improved performance is delivered courtesy of clock speed gains rather than any major microarchitectural changes. It’s a well-known fact that smartphones rarely run at their top frequencies for any length of time due to aggressive power management. If the 10nm chip can hold higher clock speeds than its 14nm predecessor, it can deliver better performance as a result. One reason why these gains often fail to result in visible performance improvements is because thermal and power envelopes limit their applicability to specific applications or workloads, and because efficiency improvements have naturally diminishing returns. For example, if it takes 2W to play a video and a new phone takes 1W to play the same video, that’ll have a very noticeable impact on battery life. If it takes 0.8W to play a video and improving technology cuts that to 0.4W, you’re still getting a benefit — but the objective visibility of that benefit is reduced.

Hexagon 682 DSP (The Snapdragon 820 had a Hexagon 680 digital signal processor, no details given on this upgrade)

Snapdragon 835 will also feature Qualcomm’s QuickCharge 4.0, which promises full USB-C compatibility while still charging 20% faster than the non-USB-C compatible QC3.0, and significant improvements in battery life. The device also supports Qualcomm’s All-Ways Aware technology and Google’s Awareness API, just in case you feel comfortable having a device explicitly designed to spy on you at all times. Given the popularity of Amazon’s Echo, as well as digital data skimmers like Siri and Cortana, I have no doubt millions of Americans will queue for the privilege of transmitting personal information to corporations with zero accountability or disclosure on how that data is used, sold, or combined with information from third parties. Given ongoing research into how Facebook buys third-party data to combine with other information you tell it about your use of the service, the utter lack of security in the IoT universe, and the way corporations that run into financial trouble suddenly discover they can sell their customer databases, I wouldn’t touch these technologies with a 10-foot pole. We’re exposed enough already. But that’s my personal opinion, not an ExtremeTech stance.

Qualcomm is billing the Snapdragon 835 as a chip that’ll deliver better VR, better 4K experiences, better battery life, and superior overall performance, with the first devices expected to ship this spring. We shall have to wait and see how things pan out — Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 has been well received, but the previous Snapdragon 810 suffered from poor OEM optimizations and the resulting increased heat and lower battery life that comes along with imperfect big.Little support in software. Hopefully the Snapdragon 835 has better buy-in from customers and more work has been done to make it easier to implement power modes.

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